Gallo: I never apologised for Brown Bunny

Actor-director Vincent Gallo has denied apologising for his derided road movie The Brown Bunny - and dismissed US film critic Roger Ebert as a "fat pig" for saying that he did.

On its recent unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was a contender for the Palme d'Or, Gallo's film was greeted by hoots of derision.

The Brown Bunny stars Gallo as a brooding biker on a cross-country odyssey through the US, who finds himself haunted by memories of an ex-girlfriend (Chloe Sevigny).

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw labelled it "the most hysterical event in Cannes history", and said that the film was "so autistic, so painfully sincere that it goes off the so-bad-it's-good scale into something else entirely".

In the wake of his film's reception, Gallo was reported to have officially apologised to journalists for having the gall to inflict it upon them. This apology was reported by Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times and by other papers around the world, including the Guardian.

Now Gallo insists that he did no such thing. "I never apologised for anything in my life," he says. "I like the movie. I had 100% creative and financial control over it, and if I didn't like it, I would have changed it.

"The only thing I am sorry about is putting a curse on Roger Ebert's colon. If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn't like my movie then I'm sorry for him."